Elioth Gruner 1882-1939

Share This

Last week I lunched at the Coogee Pavilion on the most perfect day. The scene before me was almost identical to that captured by Elioth Gruner in his beautiful small painting Fisherman, Coogee Beach (1913). Small as it is, the painting seems to jump off the wall. There is an added poignancy in the date of the picture being almost on the eve of the horrors to come in the following year. The painting provided a cracking start to Sotheby’s grand double-header sale of the David Newby Collection and Important Australian Art on 3 May; together they grossed $14.25 million, Sotheby’s highest result in 10 years. Gruner’s Coogee painting fetched $164,700, double the upper pre-sale estimate and setting an auction record for the artist.
The big gun in the auction was the heavily promoted Eugene von Guérard Breakneck Gorge, Hepburn Springs (1864) which had remained in the family of the original purchaser, the Hon. William Stanbridge until this sale. It sold for $1.95 million, almost double the estimate. Other paintings delighted their sellers: Arthur Streeton’s lovely Cremorne (1926) at $549,00, more than doubling its estimate; Rosalie Gascoigne’s Summer Fat (1995) at $585,600, inexplicably to me, 50 per cent above its estimate; an intriguing Weaver Hawkins Seated Man Beneath Umbrella (1921) at $73,200 nearly three times its estimate; and a charming J.S.Watkins (who?) Goldfish (1919) at $103,700, a runaway at over four times its estimate. Art consumer confidence is high. Happy days are here again!

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for a quality of argument not found in any other publication. Get more Spectator Australia for less – just $20 for 10 issues

Subscription expired

Your subscriber number is the 8 digit number printed above your name on the address sheet sent with your magazine each week. If you receive it, you’ll also find your subscriber number at the top of our weekly highlights email.

Entering your subscriber number will enable full access to all magazine articles on the site.

If you cannot find your subscriber number then please contact us on customerhelp@subscriptions.spectator.co.uk or call 0330 333 0050. If you’ve only just subscribed, you may not yet have been issued with a subscriber number. In this case you can use the temporary web ID number, included in your email order confirmation.

You can create an account in the meantime and link your subscription at a later time. Simply visit the My Account page, enter your subscriber number in the relevant field and click 'submit changes'.

If you have any difficulties creating an account or logging in please take a look at our FAQs page.